News

How GorillaStack Saved A Major Telco 36% Of Their Cloud Spend – $4,000,000

Challenge

Rising Cloud Costs

A major telecommunications service provider made a strategic decision in early 2017 to begin to shift workloads from on-premise data centers to the cloud. Cost oversight and governance were fundamental requirements for success. They projected expanding to more than $1M monthly spend on cloud over the following 36 months and thoroughly evaluated whether a homegrown DevOps solution for resource management was the best option or third-party tools would deliver a better outcome.

Solution

GorillaStack’s Rules Engine was deployed as SaaS in July of 2017 in response to “bill shock” and a mandate to implement cloud cost governance prior to further expanding the number of workloads in AWS. At that time, the customer was spending a few tens of thousands of dollars per month on cloud. After proving in the various use cases for resource management automation and the savings of ~30% in aggregate, they continued their migration and expansion into cloud with confidence. Both non-production and production resources are covered by the solution.

Acting On Cloud Insights

The customer uses Cloudability to get insights into resource usage patterns. They have also developed a host of custom BI dashboards that inspect the CUR directly to analyze and apportion costs. The GorillaStack Rules Engine is commonly used in conjunction with these analytic solutions to act on the recommendations of these systems with programmatic automation, something these systems do lightly if at all.

Amongst other automations, the customer used GorillaStack for the following:

Scheduling out-of-hours scaling down of production ASGs to 0 instances and then scaling back up when traffic dictates resulting in savings of 50% on these ASGs.

Cleanup of detached volumes and a pruned snapshot lifecycle resulting in savings on S3 storage.

Dozens of application teams and their resources are managed by one DevOps manager using the GorillaStack platform.

Results

Over the period Oct 2017 to Sep 2018, the customer would have spent ~$11M USD on their cloud services running in the 2 score or so accounts managed by the GorillaStack platform. Instead they spent only ~$7M, saving ~$4M or 36% of their budget. Across EC2, RDS and ASGs, 23M instance hours were reduced.

Data Center Migration

This has allowed them to accelerate their shift from on premise data centers to the cloud and proven in an even greater ROI for their cloud migration initiative.

What could you do with 36% of your cloud spend put back into your budget?

If you’d like to discuss your infrastructure and how our software can help you – get in touch!